Budgeting the Future: Negotiating the Values of a Contemporary Liberal Democracy

I wish to explore, first of all, the nature of the crisis of liberal democracy and will argue that it is essentially a crisis of meaning. If, as I believe, we are entering a new period of ideological candor and contest, we must examine some inhibiting factors in making the case for liberal democracy. These factors are in large part internal to Western thought, but they are also increasingly vulnerable to our perspective on the future ofthe “third” and “fourth” worlds, that is, to the poor. Finally, I wish to suggest some directions that could sustain and enliven our hope for the democratic prospect.The first twinges of anxiety have turned into a torrent of rumors building toward a new consensus that democracy is now on the defensive and probably in decline. What some view with fear and others with hope is not all that sudden or all that new.

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Almost Magic

American Literature and the Long Downturn ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198852704.003.0006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 123-148

Author(s):

Dan Sinykin

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

General Condition ◽

Liberal Democracy ◽

Growing Up ◽

Infinite Jest ◽

Collective Self ◽

The Future ◽

Unlimited Growth ◽

The Cold War ◽

Governmental Form

As a teenager growing up in the Minneapolis suburbs in the 1990s, I believed the economy was strong, that liberal democracy, after the Cold War, was the final governmental form, and that the future was a place of unlimited growth. But this self-congratulation obscured the persistence of the long downturn and capitalism’s structural limits. Finance was an engine for creating personal debt and harvesting profits from America’s debtors. Neoliberalism collapsed the citizen into the consumer. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest satirizes this America. It reveals addiction as a general condition within the debt economy. In anticipation of collective self-destruction, it hopes to save its readers from the pains of addiction and loneliness, but proves incapable of resolving the tension between the personal (addiction) and the structural (the economy), and so, instead, spills out toward infinity.

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